Jim Dailing

"Creating jewelry is an alchemist's blend of science and art, a synergy of mind and soul."

Jim Dailing has made jewelry and other objects in metal since his first college class in 1977. Since that first day, he has been fascinated by the processes, both ancient and contemporary, which have become a part of his own personal vocabulary as a metal artist making a living as a jeweler. While Dailing's metal work in the early days was mostly high-polished, it has evolved today into simple designs that become a canvas for his hand-created textures. The reason for the transformation is simple. Dailing has always been drawn to historical ceramics where one can see the maker's fingerprints in the clay a thousand years later. And he began to see that the pristine polish he was painstakingly applying to his jewelry was completely erasing any evidence of the processes that had gone into its making.
Dailing is fascinated by the high-tech applications opening to metalsmiths; however, it is the more primal uses of fire, his many hammers, and the other hand tools he uses that keep him coming back to his bench with the question of what new ideas might spring to mind today.